The reports of the death of email are greatly exaggerated. In spite of the stories of email’s demise and the growth of alternatives like Facebook and Twitter, email remains healthy and a prime marketing and messaging channel.

Still, there is some support for the contention. Email is no longer the be-all and end-all of computer communication. Social channels such as Twitter and Facebook are broadly used, especially by younger professionals. In some countries, notably India and China, email hasn’t taken hold despite soaring internet use.

But the numbers show that email isn’t going away. The use of email increased 28 percent between 2015 and 2016, according to the Communicator Email Benchmark Report of 2016. This year 269 billion emails per day are expected to be sent.

Email has its problems, of course, including spam, clutter and insufficient categorization, but it is still the primary channel for communicating between business and its customers. Statistics further show that 90 percent of adults use email, including 95 percent of professionals. Even among teenagers, who are supposedly leading the charge away from email, email usage is 74 percent.

What is true is that email is changing in response to needs of users. It is becoming more flexible, more selective and giving users more options. Classification and filtering of incoming emails has become near universal, for example. In addition to the spam folder, users are setting up other folders to filter email by subject and relevance. Collaboration with multiple people through email is becoming easier, allowing several people to work on a document at once.

A number of products are being developed to give users more control over their inbox. In fact, many of the products that are touted as email replacements are actually email enhancements designed to address these issues.

The most often reported problem with email is irrelevant emails, including outright spam, which clog our inboxes. Email service providers are fighting back with better email classification to direct irrelevant messages to trash bins.

Artificial intelligence is playing a major role in the effort to make email more relevant by classifying messages more precisely.

Currently email systems can’t understand the messages they handle. Instead they use pattern matching to classify and filter email. The result is something like a dog dancing on its hind legs. The wonder isn’t that it does it well, but that it can do it at all.

AI offers the possibility of systems that can understand the email they are scanning, at least in general terms, to more accurately characterize them and route them accordingly.

The result won’t be the total death of spam, but it will mean the amount of spam will greatly decrease.

One good thing is that the computing power available to run the new email algorithms is more than sufficient, at least for now. It doesn’t look like the advances in handling email will be constrained by resources.

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Rick has been involved with computers since the days of punch cards and magnetic drum memories. He's written hundreds of articles on computers and related technology as well as a series of fantasy novels full of bad computer jokes.